How Spielbergian Dinosaur Horror The End of Oak Street Solves Hollywood’s Nostalgia Problem
The creature feature with Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor takes its cues from Spielberg thrillers but feels surprisingly fresh thanks to its biting horror elements
by Alex Kaan 15 August 2026
Warner Bros.
It’s no secret that original stories are a dying breed in Hollywood. From remakes to sequels to adaptations, there’s nothing that says risk-averse and reliable like trusted IP, and, unsurprisingly, financiers want to back something as close to a sure win as possible. It’s this landscape that makes a film such as The End of Oak Street feel like a near miracle. Cutting through a culture of recycled IP, the 80s-set creature feature proves that Hollywood does need to look to the past to move forward — but not through reboots and nostalgia bait. Instead, it revives a brand of epic, character-driven blockbuster that’s now as extinct as its antagonists.
David Robert Mitchell’s (It Follows) first film since his divisive Pynchonian thriller Under the Silver Lake stuck him in director jail, The End of Oak Street is indebted to the grand yet sentimental Amblin films of the 80s and 90s. As the colour grading, added film grain, and Michael Giacchino’s blustering score — not to mention the 1982 setting — make clear, this film is an unashamed throwback through both its aesthetics and its plot, with a framework that effectively embellishes the creature-led horror of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park with a dash of the wondrous sci-fi of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
With the kind of nuanced character dynamics not typically afforded to the modern summer tentpole, Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play a couple on the rocks whose crumbling marriage is starting to weigh on their two children (Maisy Stella of My Old Ass and Frankenstein’s Christian Convery). The rift is exacerbated when their idyllic slice of suburbia is somehow transported to prehistoric times, where they now have to fend off pterodactyls and velociraptors while working out how to get back home.
Warner Bros.
Putting actors of Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor’s calibre into a dinosaur movie that terrifies as much as it tugs at the heartstrings, The End of Oak Street is an excavated fossil of a film that delivers a mix of original storytelling and Spielbergian spectacle that Hollywood has been sorely missing. While high-concept films continue to draw in audiences, they’re usually relegated to the indie horror scene, and part of what makes Oak Street feel so fresh is its resurrection of the big-budget family adventure flick with horror elements.
And make no mistake, The End of Oak Street is a horror film — and it’s one of the most frightening in a fiercely competitive year for the genre. Punctuated by one especially shocking scene, Oak Street boasts a blend of visceral violence, impressive creature design, and sky-high stakes that makes it the most brutal PG-13 film in recent memory. What Mitchell does so well is mine the inevitably horrific realities of his fantastical premise for all their worth — there’s little sense of characters having “plot armour” as children and the elderly alike are swiftly and visciously killed by the prehistoric villains. Holding up against classics like Jaws and Jurassic Park, this is a refreshingly scary summer blockbuster that can stimulate even the most seasoned horror fan.
Warner Bros.
Of course, Hollywood is unlikely to listen to the critical acclaim surrounding the film. With juggernauts The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day still dominating the box office and taking up IMAX screens, Oak Street can expect a modest opening weekend of around $20 million, a disappointing figure given its roughly $80 million budget (it looks more expensive) and a guarantee that it will follow They Will Kill You and Evil Dead Burn as underperforming horror films for Warner Bros. this year. The film is ultimately a fairly rare tonal blend that has been underserved by the marketing, the ineffectiveness of which was laid bare in an AI dog podcast spoof featuring the film’s canine star, which went viral for all the wrong reasons.
Still, there is a modicum of hope in positive word of mouth. There’s a sizeable cohort of pleasantly surprised viewers taking to social media to tell others that it’s worthwhile, but even if the film flatlines — and it probably will — the consolation could be that studios take note that Oak Street’s thrilling, fearless storytelling has outdone every Jurassic Park sequel. And more importantly, that maybe there’s value in emulating the qualities that made a film like Spielberg’s dino-horror a classic, rather than endlessly rebooting a franchise until it’s been drained of its original charm.